


Place, Object, Occupation

by grasssea



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Awkward First Not-Dates, Improv, M/M, Mourning, post 2x18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-07 23:18:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11069145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grasssea/pseuds/grasssea
Summary: Though Dan will admit he's not sure exactly what's going on in Amenadiel's life, he wants to make it easier. Unfortunately, he's been barred from the local improv group until his technique improves. Maybe he just needs some one on one coaching, and a sympathetic ear.





	Place, Object, Occupation

The little back room with its raised stage and folding chairs was empty. It was almost midnight. 

"Okay," Dan said, shaking his head until he remembered why he was doing this again. "Let's try some simpler exercises. Maybe imitations aren't your thing."

He had to admit, Amenadiel's Lucifer had been _spot on_ , and his Maze had been pretty good too, but then he'd wandered off into a rant about the nature of god and Dan had been left feeling like he'd wandered into someone else's therapy session, again. It didn't help that Amenadiel apparently had no idea who most celebrities were, leaving them only with mutual acquaintances to work from.

Amenadiel gave him a sideways look. "Are you sure you want to do this Daniel?" It had been a solid hour. Little progress had been made, although Amenadiel did seem to be enjoying himself personally.

"Yeah, man, as long as you're getting something out of it." It seemed strange to say he owed him, when he very much didn't, but something weird had happened with the Charlotte Richards case and Dan knew it had something to do with the man in front of him and his messed up family. No one had died, and that was a win, and Chloe and Lucifer were more than fine, which was it's own bizarre kind of victory, and so Dan was prepared to spend a night trying to teach the only person in Los Angeles without any acting instinct whatsoever how to make believe. It wasn't like he had anything better to do. 

"I think I am," Amenadiel admitted, taking a swig from a water bottle. "I can't describe it, but this feels... good."

That was all the encouragement Dan needed. "Great. Maybe some non-verbal stuff next though? Because, no offense man, sometimes the things you say are really dark. If you want to come back to the group, you need to learn to keep it light."

Amenadiel nodded, slowly, as if he was writing this down in a notebook in his brain and underlining it. "I'm not the brother of light, but I'll do my best."

Dan blinked, moved past that little mystery, and moved on. "How about some movement studies? It's when you pick an object or an animal and try to move like it. The point is to really lose your boundaries. You need to be prepared to act silly, to look silly, in the pursuit of realism."

That had been one of the hardest things for him. Ego was a big hurdle to jump, and Dan had been hesitant to give up his dignity. Finally letting himself go, being unafraid of freedom or getting laughed at, had been a big moment for him. He also knew it wasn't an easy thing to do all alone. One person on a stage acting like an idiot was an idiot. Two people were a comedy troupe. 

"I'll do it with you," he offered, and found he really liked Amenadiel's appreciative smile. He had a good smile, not wicked or sardonic like Lucifer's. Unlike his brother, Amenadiel really seemed to be an honest man. Honest, inside and out. "We'll need an animal or something else that moves. Some machines are good."

Next to him, Amenadiel really seemed to consider it, which Dan should have taken as the first warning sign. After a pause he said, "A human?"

"Ah." All sensible responses to that fled from Dan's head. "I feel like that might be good if we were philosophy students, but I'm just a cop. You've gotta aim low for me. How about something simpler, like a snake or a cat or something."

"A snake then," Amenadiel amended quickly, looking a little awkward. Everyone did, standing on a stage. Simply the act of being stage adjacent made you aware of your posture, what your hands were doing. It made everything feel stiff and a little posed, like you were one of Ella's anatomic dolls she used to figure out the staging of crime scenes. 

Dan stuffed his hands in his pocket and nodded. "Snake. Now, we need to really think about a snake. How do they get around? What parts of their body would correspond to what parts of yours? More than that, what do they feel like?" It was the same spiel Dan had gotten the first time he'd played this game, in this same room, except there'd been twenty people then and it had all sounded a lot less stupid. "Um, you can do whatever you want, but the point is to just go for it. Do what you feel is right, don't hesitate or second guess it. And don't base it on what the other people around you are doing, make up your own thing."

He nodded, solemnly, waiting, until Dan clapped his hands together. "We can start any time. Now?"

In spurts and jolts, the two of them began moving. It started out slow, in hip rolls and slithery steps and low shimmies. It always started out slow. Everyone was always afraid. This time it was faster than usual, Amenadiel seemed to have less of the inhibitions other people did. Being related to Lucifer had to show itself in some way.

Dan tried to concentrate on his own body and not running into anyone else, but from time to time he would glance at Amenadiel, who seemed utterly lost in being a snake. He'd taken it to heart, he was face down on the floor, undulating gently with more flexibility then Dan really expected from a man of his build. There was something almost hypnotic about the movements, about him. Underneath his shirt, the muscles of his back and shoulders were shifting strangely, in ways Dan, a man accustomed to the human body, didn't feel was quite right. 

Amenadiel stopped, sat up, looked at him. "Are we done with this one?" he asked. 

"Yeah," Dan agreed, "yeah, I think we are."

 

 

 

They took a water break. Dan checked his texts. Trixie was in bed, Chloe had noted, and she was going down to the station to finish up some work. Maze, once the last thing they'd wanted in a babysitter, had proven herself an excellent source of childcare over the last few weeks. Better than that, she didn't charge exorbitant fees or need reassurance that Trixie wouldn't try to run away on her. 

When Dan returned to the stage, he found Amenadiel staring at the ceiling, lost in thought. 

"Do you want to finish up?"

Lucifer's brother looked down at Dan with the air of someone who had only just remembered they weren't alone, and to Dan's surprise, he looked sad. "Hmm? No, I could go a while longer. Do you?"

"My kid's in bed and my shift doesn't start until eight tomorrow. I could go all night."

That startled a laugh from Amenadiel. "More movement exercises then? I actually had an idea for one." He said it with the air of someone making a very big decision. 

Dan leaned against the wall of the stage, where the limited wings began wandered off into the shadows. Backstage was a mess of props and costumes stored by other groups who used the room, casting ominous shapes in the few lights he'd left on after everyone else had left. "Go for it."

"I thought, I could try to do a bird. It's been a while since I've flown, you see."

He said it with such sincerity too, like he trusted Dan with this grain of truth. Dan nodded, "Yeah, give it your best shot."

Amenadiel was less forthright when he's alone on stage, though not by much. He made eye-contact for too long, then closed his eyes and stood, still as a statue. Most people would have been flapping their arms at that point, but Amenadiel just paced, jaw and neck work furiously, along with, Dan realized, most of the muscles of his upper body. Something was building in the air, like static electricity, crackling at the base of your neck and the back of your teeth. Dan clutched his water bottle tightly and stared, as Amenadiel he opened his eyes, stretched his arms back until his shoulder blades seemed to touch, and _jumped_. 

A flash of searing light, every colour and none at all, wrote itself across the back of Dan's eyes and then retreated as suddenly as it had come, leaving only the room and two stunned people. 

Amenadiel fell to his knees at about the same time as Dan fell out of his chair. 

"What the hell was that?!"

"Sorry, I didn't mean for that to happen!"

He really didn't, Dan realized, swallowing saliva that tasted like blood and hoisting himself to his feet. His eyes still felt like they'd been fryed in oil, and his vision was weirdly inverted, but he could see Amenadiel's sincere regret and concern as he picked himself up and came down off the stage. For someone who had just gone off like a flash grenade, he seemed remarkably untouched. More than that, he looked... invigorated. Maybe it was just the leftover light dancing in Dan's head, but he could have sworn the man was glowing. 

Daniel Espinoza was passable detective, an average cop, and a not terrible father. He tried to be a good man. Good men didn't jump to conclusions. He took a deep breath. 

"Hey, uh, buddy, what just happened?"

 

 

They ended up going to a bar. Other people were safety, and besides, you could only spend so long in a public theater before you started getting worrying about catching some sort of minor STD. Dan locked up with still shaking hands and they found a quiet place a few streets down with good reviews and, more importantly, a seating plan that allowed for serious conversations in corners. 

Dan got a beer. Amenadiel had a cosmopolitan. 

Eventually it became clear he wasn't going to open up on his own. The truth was going to have to be pried out. Luckily, Dan was an experienced hand at interrogations. "So, that light...?" 

"Oh. To be honest, Dan, I'm not sure how to explain this. It's all sort of complicated, and I really didn't think that would work. To put it simply, my body hasn't been working the way it's meant to for the last few months. Recently I made a small improvement, under extreme stress, but I'm still trying to work myself back up to my previous level of power. When you said this sort of thing helped you, I thought it might help me too if I was able to visualize things that way. It succeeded, more than I expected."

Dan mulled this over. "You're still making no sense," he said frankly, and tried to take a sip of his beer. It was hoppy and bitter, too much so for his tastes, but he forced himself to drink it anyways. 

Amenadiel sighed. "No, I suppose I'm not. Will you accept that it was a power surge?"

"It didn't look like a power surge," Dan pointed out, tired already. "Look, is this about Lucifer's... weirdness?"

The corner of Amenadiel's usual, amiable smile twisted up. "Is that what you call it?"

"I mean, we've got to call it something. He makes people act differently around him. That's all I know. And Charlotte, your step-mom, right? She had something going on with her too." Dan hesitated for a second, unsure of how much he wanted to divulge. "She, uh, we were close. In a way."

"You slept together," Amenadiel said with a grimace, "I know."

"After that though, she kept trying to talk to me. She said some really strange stuff." No one in real life used the word human that much to refer to other people. Not in the way she had. "Then after the boardwalk incident last week, I tried to go talk to her when she was in custody. She didn't remember me. She couldn't remember anything from before that employee of hers tried to kill her a few months back. Staff psychologist said it was probably a combination of trauma and memory repression, and we couldn't get much else out of her before she got out on bail."

The LAPDs contractor psychiatric professionals were kind of hit and miss. Dan was inclined to count this one as a miss. Falling off a boardwalk seemed unlikely to be the traumatic incident that broke the camel's back. Yet here they were. 

Charlotte hadn't called. It had been a week. She hadn't been around Lucifer either. According to police reports, she'd spent the whole week at home or at work. (She had a husband, apparently. And kids, two of them, not much older than Trixie.)

Melancholy had spread over Amenadiel's face, like he had lost someone too, someone more than just a deranged hookup turned supervillain. "She was always... complicated. Let's just say she's not talking to Lucifer or I either. She's left us for somewhere else entirely." Again, his choice of words bordered on the bizarre, but Dan felt inclined to believe there was some truth to them.

"I'm sorry. Like I said, your family is weird. That's not counting all the times I've seen Lucifer get out of handcuffs or shrug off bullets or move faster than he should have, or how he saved Chloe, or everything else. I just... I do need to have some idea what's going on, whether it's vampires or mutant powers or he's really the devil."

Amenadiel toyed with his drink for a while, swirling it in his glass until he finally gave up hope of waiting out this line of questioning. "Let's just say, it's not human, it is divine, it's probably not a danger to you, and I won't let it be a problem in the future. It was foolish of me to try to be around humans now."

Divine wasn't a word you often heard thrown around dingy bars at eleven thirty at night. Dan looked around, at the other patrons, totally oblivious, at the lineup of brews behind the counter, at the framed posters on the walls and the peeling cardboard coasters on the table. Then he laughed. "You sound like your brother. You always struck me as smarter than he was, but here you are, going off on the same tangent. 'I'm not safe', 'God is real and I hate him.' Like one of the bad romance books my older sister reads. Just, don't try to be a bird again, okay? No more lightshows and I think we'll be fine."

Once he felt a little less like giggling into Amenadiel's concerned face, he ventured, "Divine, huh?"

Amenadiel shrugged, "More or less. You seem a little hysterical, so let's leave it at that for now."

"Should I start going back to church?" It had been years, probably since Trixie was christened. Cops kept weird schedules and church had never quite fit into his life. 

He shook his head, "That's up to you, I think. I'm not going to judge."

"Amenadiel, Amenadiel," Dan rolled the name around on his tongue for a while. "Was there an angel named that?"

Amenadiel's smile flashed, white as clouds, "Not in any of the texts you would have read, no."

Dan took another big gulp of beer. 

After a while, Amenadiel said softly, "You're taking this very well. I could go, if you like."

"No, no. I said you needed a friend and I was going to be one. That doesn't change if you're part angel, or, something." Full angel was still a step too far for Dan's brain to handle. He was willing to accept that there was something going on that arguably fell into the realm of the supernatural, but Amenadiel had been right, putting words to it was too much.

"Thank you. I really appreciate everything you've done for me. It's been rough lately."

"I guessed," Dan said sarcastically, then regretted it. Friends were supposed to be more supportive then that. 

"Lucifer is Lucifer, and my friend is in the hospital and my mother is... not here anymore."

"Your friend the doctor, right?" he asked, trying to navigate the conversation back into known waters. "Maze talks about her sometimes, she sounds great."

The smile returned, like a glimpse of the sun through heavy fog. "Linda, yes. She's very forgiving. Quite possibly too forgiving. And incredibly smart." He sounded fond, and again, sad. Worried as well, and Dan remembered what that was like. Chloe's own hospital stay was still fresh in his memory. 

"Some people are just good like that," Dan sighed, "You have to learn to appreciate them selflessly."

Amenadiel nodded, took a sip of his drink. "That's very wise."

"I mean, I've made some mistakes in my time. When I was first with Chloe, I didn't always remember to love her first and myself second. I didn't always remember to be honest with her. And I paid for that. I lost a huge part of my life because I couldn't figure out how to be a good friend and a good husband until it was too late," Dan shifted, uncomfortably, suddenly aware of Amenadiel's gaze on him. Opening up never got easier. "I learned though, and I think I'm going to keep learning."

There was a warm, alcoholic silence that enveloped their table, not entirely safe yet but getting closer. Dan leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and watched the filaments of blue and purple light drift until Amenadiel touched his hand. 

"Dan," he said, in that too sincere voice that Dan suspected meant he was in for another hug. "You're a good human."

It was probably meant to be touching. Instead, Dan spluttered. "God, don't say that! You sound like Charlotte."

Amenadiel made a face, instinctively, and then both of them were recoiling at the resulting mental images, then laughing because laughing was better than feeling weird about it. 

"Sorry," he said, once they were both mostly upright again, "That came out wrong. I meant to say, you're a good person. You've been very kind to me, though I understand Lucifer has made your life difficult."

"You can say that again," Dan muttered. 

"And even though I don't think I'll ever be good at improv, I think it's given me a chance to get a lot off my chest, and some hope. I appreciate that as well," he said, standing up. 

Dan stood up with him, so they were both crammed in the small aisle between corner tables. The one next to them was already all wiped down, the chairs stacked on top of it. "Are you leaving already?

"I don't want to keep you," Amenadiel said politely, but something about the way he was standing made Dan think he didn't want to go. This close together, he could feel the tension in Amenadiel's back, like he was straining to be two places at once. 

"Look, if you're worried about it being weird, I think we're fine. You're... you, your family's strange, that's that. Doesn't mean we can't still hang out, if you want. I've had awkwarder friendships, I mean, I work with my ex-wife." He could feel the words tumbling out of him, too fast and too sudden and a little too loud in a hip to hip space. 

Then, Amenadiel kissed him. 

As far as kisses went, Dan'd had better. Much better. Amenadiel seemed to have only a general idea of what he was doing and very real fear that anything more than the lightest touch would break both of them. It barely brushed Dan's lips before retreating. 

They both froze. 

"That was..." Amenadiel began awkwardly. 

"I didn't realize you felt that way about me," Dan began at the exact same time, every word a carefully placed jenga block in a game being played with C4, "But, uh, that's a thing, I guess."

"Sorry," Amenadiel apologized. 

"No, it's fine," Dan said before he could fully process the words coming out of his mouth. "Warning, next time, but fine."

The thing was, he hadn't not liked it. Quite the opposite. Amenadiel was handsome the same way Lucifer was handsome, a handsome that transcended gender and appealed simply to the eyes as an organ, except unlike Lucifer he wasn't a prick about it. And the kiss had been... nice. Not Charlotte drowning, like being submerged in a sea with no escape. Not as bright and shining and inescapable as Chloe had been either. Chloe and Charlotte were the sort of women you couldn't take your eyes off of. Amenadiel was beautiful, but he was also soft. The kiss had been light as a feather. 

Charlotte, Dan realized with dread, he'd slept with Charlotte, who was probably Amenadiel's mother, last time he'd checked. That did add a certain messed up element to all of this. 

He assessed his options. Running away was clearly what Amenadiel was in favour of, though he was, to all appearances, also rooted in place for the time being. No one could fault them for that. But Dan had run away enough as of late. This was a person who hasn't betrayed him, didn't seem to be murderous in the slightest, and was fun to hang out with. 

"So," Dan said, "Do you want to get another drink?"

Amenadiel slowly thawed enough to look at him, consideringly. "Do you have time?" he asked, sounding more and more like a gentleman. Dan started to wonder who was going to end up paying for this whole thing, and if he was going to have to fight to keep his jacket. 

That was an issue for later though. 

"Like I said, I have all night. What about you?"

"All night," Amenadiel echoed, with a smile.

 


End file.
